Table of Contents
Autonomy of Higher Education Institutions
• A new scheme of greater autonomy
to educational institutions has
been announced.
•NAAC scores: I, II and Lower.
• Those in the highest category
• freedom to start new courses
• hire foreign faculty
• pay higher emoluments to faculty
Autonomy of Higher Education Institutions
• Autonomy has been identified as the key to improving
the quality of higher education in India.
•It set syllabus, minimum qualifications for recruitment
and specified attendance.
• Arbiter of standards and all institutions were expected
to fall in line.
• An academic had to collect under the API system to get
promoted
• Teachers had to be upgraded periodically through
training institutions.
Has the quality of education improved with all these
standards?
Standards be achieved by standardisation?
•Great institutions of learning accept that knowledge is
not ready made and has multiple sources.
•Different people have different ways of learning and
producing knowledge.
• Nobel Prize winner Higgs (God particle fame) said for
the first 15 years at Cambridge he did not publish
anything.
• Many may fail and others who learn from them may
advance knowledge.
• A degree of irreverence toward authority is essential.
•Good teaching and research go hand in hand.
• Academic autonomy must filter down.
•The latest move to provide graded autonomy to
institutions is designed to curtail the autonomy of
academics in these institutions.
•The catch is that the institutions will have to generate
their own funds for many of the freedoms they are
being granted.
• So, they would be subject to the dictates of the
market.
•Consequently, professional courses may get money but
not the core social sciences or sciences.
‘Impeachment not always the solution’
•Impeachment is not the solution to deal with an errant
judge.
•He said efforts should be made first to correct the
system or put a “proper, alternative” system in place.
• “Role of judiciary in democracy”, agreed with the
government’s view that there should be an audit of the
judiciary and its collegium system in a democracy.
• “No system created by human beings is perfect. There
has always been problems, accidents, failures of
assessment, mistakes. Always good to audit the system,”
Justice Chelameswar said.
• Why Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra continues to hear
all the important cases?
• “He is the master of roster … If he has the energy to do the entire work,
let him do it.”
• Justice Chelameswar said the importance of a judge was not
dependent on the nature of the case he took. “There is a
great way of doing small things and a small way of doing
great things,” he said
• “Thwarting the appointment of Justice Ranjan Gogoi as the
next Chief Justice of India will only prove what we said in the
January 12 press conference is true,” Justice Chelameswar
said.
• The January 12 press conference held by the four senior-most
judges — Justices Chelameswar, Gogoi, Madan B. Lokur and
Kurian Joseph — was the first public attack against Chief
Justice Misra, accusing the latter of selectively allocating
cases to preferred Benches.
Nepal for ties based on mutual respect
• Placing barriers on movement of goods and people is
incompatible with the modern era, said Nepal Prime
Minister K.P. Sharma Oli on Saturday, in an indirect
reference to the economic blockade of his country,
which lasted for several months during 2015-16.
• Strongly pitching for an interconnected Asian continent,
the visiting leader said Kathmandu has embarked on a
path of social and economic development after 2017
multi-level elections and urged greater connectivity,
trade and electricity cooperation with India
• The blockade, which lasted many months, took place
during Mr. Oli’s last tenure as Prime Minister.
•Nepali leaders had then blamed India for supporting the
Madhesi groups from the Nepal’s plains that had imposed
the punitive measure seeking changes in the 2015
Constitution.
•India had maintained that the blockade was an internal
matter and had to be resolved through dialogue among
various parties.
Three dead as van rams crowd in Germany
• A van drove into a crowd outside a popular bar in the
western German city of Muenster on Saturday, killing
three people and injuring 20 others, police said.
• Police spokesman Andreas Bode told reporters the driver
of the vehicle killed himself after the crash.
•He said the driver’s identity was not yet known and that
it was too early to speculate about his motive.
• Muenster is a major university city with about 300,000
residents.
Science and Technology
NASA set to build quiet supersonic planes
• NASA is set to develop an ‘experimental plane’ designed to
fly faster than the speed of sound without producing the
noise typical of supersonic flights.
• The X-plane’s mission is to provide crucial data that could
enable commercial supersonic passenger air travel over
land.
• NASA has awarded a USD 247.5 million contract to USbased
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company to build the Xplane
and deliver it to the agency by the end of 2021.
• The design research speed of the X-plane at a cruising
altitude of 55,000 feet is 1,512 kilometres per hour.
• Its top speed will be 1,593 kilometres per hour.
Science and Technology
Tough terrain saves Sikkim’s high-altitude forests
• Being higher and out of reach is probably saving Sikkim’s
high-altitude tropical forests.
• Scientists find that land-use patterns changed more
drastically in the more-accessible lower regions, causing
a staggering 16% decline in primary broadleaved forest
cover in the Sikkim Himalaya.
• Primary forests, which host native vegetation and are
still undisturbed by human activities, are declining
worldwide.
•Globally, more than 40 million hectares of such forest
have been converted for other uses since 2000.
CSMCRI uses seaweed to remove lead, chromium and
dyes from wastewater
•Removing toxic metals such as lead and
chromium and certain dyes from industrial
wastewater much more effectively has
become possible thanks to the work of Indian
researchers.
•Researchers at CSIR-Central Salt & Marine
Chemicals Research Institute, Bhavanagar,
Gujarat have synthesised a graphene–iron
sulphide nanocomposite to remove these toxic
materials from wastewater.
Engineer makes poly robots out of scrap metal
• A resident of India’s northern Chandigarh city, Matharu uses
the earnings from his job as an engineer to support his hobby.
• What may appear as trash to others may be the limbs or face
of his robot figures for Matharu.
• Matharu started making these robots in 2013 after being
inspired by self-taught artist Nek Chand Saini, the man behind
Chandigarh’s famed Rock Garden.
• Matharu’s robot figures are made by welding together varied
things like locks, nuts and bolts, keys, pipes and springs.
• Matharu hopes to seek funding to start large-scale production
in future and finally sell his robots.
Data on up to 87 million Facebook users shared with UK
firm
•Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike
Schroepfer made the announcement in a statement
announcing the implementation of new privacy
tools for users of the huge social network.
•
“In total, we believe the Facebook information of
up to 87 million people — mostly in the US — may
have been improperly shared with Cambridge
Analytica,” he said.
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